Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Kue Rangi

Festivals keep rolling here in Jakarta. As the city's anniversary are getting closer, the city becomes more attractive. There are lots of interesting activities during the last weekends, unfortunately I couldn't catch all of them. Nevertheless, we still had some family agenda during the weekend.

On last weekend we managed to attend the annual 'Palang Pintu Festival' in Kemang area, just for a couple of hours. The location is not too far from our home, and it's a friendly festival for family; the children still could enjoy the event. It's interesting to know that they started to recognize some of the traditional foods and some attractions. Cool!

@ Palang Pintu Festival, Kemang, Jakarta - June 2012

I took many pictures there but unfortunately I have no enough time for editing those pictures until now. Hopefully during this week I have time to 're-size' some of them and share on my next posting.

For now, to continue my adventure to rediscover Betawi traditional street food, I'm going to share the recipe of Kue Rangi, one of the famous authentic traditional Betawi snacks. During the Palang Pintu Festival I had a change to take some more pictures of making of Kue Rangi.

Kue Rangi is a simple traditional cake made by mixing grated coconut with sago flour, water and pinch of salt. It is cooked on a special mold using fire wood (no idea why fire wood, do you?). Soon after it is cooked and taken out from the mold, the warm palm sugar sauce will be spread on top of it.
It's crunchy on outside part and chewy inside. It has beautiful combination between savory-tasty coconut cake and sweet flavor from the sauce. Also it has nice harmony texture between the crunchy-chewy cake and gluey sauce. Delicious!
Normally, we can find Kue Rangi sellers with their two-wheeler push cart or carrying cart.

When I made it at home, I had to make little adjustment.
First, because I used a different size of standard Kue Rangi mold *that I borrowed from my mom, I decided to make single slices Kue Rangi. The notch on the mold are quite big, so I didn't put the batter until the top of the mold, only 2/3 part. I'm happy with the result, producing finger food size snack with the nice texture. It's dry and crunchy outside, soft and chewy inside. Just like what the theory says.

Second adjustment; instead of put the sauce on the unmolded cake, I chose to serve the 'plain cake' without spreading the sauce yet. I let everybody to dip the cake to the sauce just before they eat it. For us, it is really enjoyable while sitting down together, having our afternoon tea and dip the cake by ourselves on the sweet warm sauce. Yummy!

*Gula Merah, this is made from the sap of the coconut or sago palm tree, and is molded in various forms. Sometimes called palm sugar, it gives the cookies a brownish color. It tastes sweet, but the flavor is not as strong as that of granulated sugar ( source: The best of Indonesia Dessert, by Yasa Boga).